You want to lighten the load of your customer service team, so you sign up for a service that allows for automated responses to consumer replies to your company’s marketing SMS messages. Indeed, SMS autoresponders are highly regarded as an ideal solution for answering basic queries or engaging consumers at exactly the right time in the buying cycle. There’s just one problem: You can find SMS autoresponders in various complexities, and you aren’t exactly sure what your customer service team needs.
Before you can make an informed decision on this issue, you need to become informed about how SMS autoresponders work. Here’s that guide, with all the information you need about different levels of autoresponse technology.
The Components of an Autoresponder
At its most basic, an autoresponder is no more or less complicated than a program that sends a specific message when a customer behaves in a particular way. Thus, every autoresponder includes two key components:
Automation rules, specify which consumer actions trigger which business SMS messages, and
The autoresponder program adheres to the outlined rules and sends SMS messages when prompted.
Though autoresponders eliminate a sizeable amount of relatively redundant work for sales and customer service staff, they are ultimately rather rudimentary programs that follow simple rules and have potentially significant results.
The Types of Autoresponses
SMS auto-responding is relatively young as a marketing practice, but there are a few different situations that warrant autoresponses that you might be interested in building into your automation rules. These include:
Welcome texts. As soon as a customer opts into an organization’s texting service, they should receive a message welcoming them to the program. This text will lay the foundation for what customers can expect from this brand’s messages, so you must put care into the language and structure of this message. Additionally, you should provide some sort of immediate reward to customers who sign up, like a limited-time discount on their first purchase.
Abandoned cart texts. Many customers will spend time sifting through your business’s offerings and adding items to their cart but fall short of checking out and making purchases. When a cart has been untouched for a certain period of time, you might trigger an autoresponder to remind the customer about the products they could buy. One study found that about one-third of abandoned cart messages can lead to a recovered sale.
Upsell and cross-sell texts. Once a customer has completed a transaction, you know a little more about their interests and are able to target them with more accurate marketing. The purchase of certain products might prompt your autoresponder to send messages containing information about similar or related products. It tends to be much easier to sell to existing customers, so upselling and cross-selling is a smart marketing tactics.
Appointment reminder texts. If your business involves arranging meetings with customers, it might be a good idea to connect your SMS autoresponder to your client calendar and autoresponder with reminders about upcoming appointments. You might program the autoresponder to send several messages at different intervals before the event to ensure your customer knows exactly when to show up.
The Steps of Creating an Autoresponse
Your business should utilize an autoresponder service, which will make the process of crafting and sending an SMS autoresponse easy and straightforward. A professional marketing autoresponder will walk you through the steps of drafting your automation rules, so you can be certain that your text messages will reach your customers exactly when you need them to. What’s more, when you rely on an autoresponder service, you have access to a knowledgeable customer service team that can walk you through the steps of creating automation rules and attaching messages with their program, should you need expert advice during the process.
Companies have been using email autoresponders for decades, but SMS autoresponders give businesses more direct contact with their customers. With SMS marketing, you have the opportunity to forge strong and deep relationships with your customers, who are likely to remember and appreciate your brand. The sooner you set up an SMS autoresponder campaign for your brand, the sooner you can engage your customers through their favored communication method.
